Saturday, 20 February 2016

Once upon
a time, in a land far, far away, there was a fisherman who lived by the shore
of a great lake.

So vast was this lake that from one side
one couldn’t see the other, and when the storm winds blew from the north, the
winds would blow the waves before them and bring them crashing to the shore as
though they were breakers on the shores of the distant sea.

The fisherman was very poor. He lived alone
in a hut by the lakeside. It wasn’t a big hut. The fisherman had built it
himself, with mud from the banks and reed from the lake, and each rainy season
it crumbled and leaked, so that he had to rebuild it again. He also had a boat,
which was very old and had come down to him from his father and his father
before him, and a net which was frayed with age.

Each day, rain or shine, the fisherman
would paddle out into the lake and throw in his net. The catch was usually very
meagre, for, truth to tell, the net was so frayed and full of holes that for
every fish he pulled aboard, three managed to slip out and escape. Whatever was
left, the fisherman would then take to the nearest village, and sell for what
he could get.

It was a hard life, and the fisherman was
not happy with it, but there was nothing else he knew how to do; and he
worried, because he was growing old.

One morning, as usual, he went down to the
shore from his hut, and looked at his boat, which lay upturned on the pebbles,
and he saw how ancient it was, how the wood was almost worn out. And he looked
at his net, which was spread out on the rocks to dry, but which, despite all
his mending, was even more tattered than ever.

“I can’t buy a new boat or a new net,” he
sighed aloud. “And I’m getting as old and decrepit as the boat and the net.
Soon, I can’t fish anymore, and then there won’t be anything left for me but to
starve.”

“Why don’t you take an apprentice?” a
little voice enquired, apparently from right behind him. The fisherman turned
to see, but there was nothing but the mud and pebble of the lake shore and the
water beyond. “Take in an apprentice, train him in the work, on condition that
he take care of you in your old age.”

“Who’s there?” the fisherman demanded. “Are
you a ghost or a demon?”

“Ghost? Demon?” the voice laughed. “Hardly.
Look in the pool by your feet.”

So the fisherman looked in the pool, which was hollow in the rocks by the
water’s edge, and in the very bottom of it, there was a crack in the stone.
Peering out at him, waving a claw, was a large crab.

“Do I look like a ghost or a demon?” the
crab demanded. “I’m only a crab offering a word of advice. Find an apprentice,
teach him your job, and he’ll take care of you in your old age.”

“Who would be fool enough to learn this
thankless trade?” the fisherman asked bitterly. “Only those who are luckless
enough to be born into it will pick up a net anymore.”

“Why don’t you try and see?” the crab
persisted. “You don’t have any other choice, do you?”

The fisherman laughed shortly. “If any
apprentice joins me under those conditions,” he said, “I’ll give him anything
he wants that I can drag out from the bottom of the lake – anything at all.”
And, paying no more heed to the crab, he pulled down the boat to the water and
paddled out into the lake. Because the boat was leaking badly, he could only go
a little way, into waters which the fish had already learnt to avoid, and threw
in the net. And though he fished all day, he caught nothing at all – not even a
single fish for his own supper. Nor could he go out again at night because by
evening heavy clouds had gathered over the lake and thunder rumbled ominously
on the horizon. So, not for the first time, he had to go to bed hungry.

The storm had broken overhead, rain lashing
down, and the fisherman was huddled, miserable and hungry, on his thin mattress
when there was a rapping at the door of his hut. At first he ignored it, imagining
it was just the rain. But when it grew persistent and so loud that it rivalled
the crash of thunder overhead, he got up to open the door, for he thought it
might be a traveller seeking shelter from the storm. That it might be a bandit
or some other malefactor, he didn’t even consider for a moment, for he was far
too poor and insignificant for anyone to bother to do him harm.

Outside the door, claw raised to knock
again, was the crab.

“Did you mean what you said, fisherman?” it
demanded. “You’ll give anyone who becomes an apprentice whatever he wants of
what you can pull out of the water of the lake?”

When the fisherman had got over his
astonishment, he nodded. “I said that, and I meant it,” he said. “But it’s a
pointless offer anyway, because I can no longer even find fish enough to feed
myself, let alone find something for an apprentice.”

“Are you hungry?” the crab asked. “Just
wait.” Turning, it scuttled away sideways into the night, and, before the
fisherman could quite persuade himself that he was awake, not dreaming, it
returned bearing a fish in each of its claws. “There you are.”

The fisherman cleaned and gutted the fish,
but he couldn’t cook it, for the roof of the hut was leaking so badly that the
water dripped on everything, and he couldn’t get a fire going.

“Wait a moment,” the crab said, and
vanished into the darkness. In only a little while it had returned, dragging
palm fronds in its claws, which it pulled up to the roof. In less time than it
takes to tell of it, it had mended the roof, and the drip of water had stopped
entirely.

“So,” the crab said, “will you now take me
on as your apprentice? I can do much more for you than I’ve done just now.”

The fisherman, having eaten, was feeling a
lot better, and nodded slowly, considering. “But who ever heard of a crab
becoming a fisherman’s apprentice?” he asked.

“Who ever heard of a crab talking, either?”
the crustacean demanded. “Or, for that matter, who ever heard of a crab
repairing a roof?”

The fisherman had to admit the animal was
right, and finally agreed to take it on as an apprentice. “But only if you do
everything I tell you,” he warned. “Fail, and out you’ll go. And, of course,”
he added, “if I can’t catch anything, there will be nothing for you. My boat
and net are all but falling to pieces.”

“You won’t have to worry about that,” the
crab said. “Now go to sleep, and I’ll meet you in the morning by the lake.”
Waving a claw, it scuttled away.

The fisherman went back to bed, still wondering
if he were dreaming.

In the morning the storm was over, and the
fisherman went down to the lakeside, wondering if the wind and rain had
battered the boat to pieces and ripped the net apart. To his astonishment, he
found the net neatly repaired with strips of coconut fibre plaited and woven
tight. As to the boat, it was upturned on the shore, and the crab was busy on
it, sealing the cracks with resin. It saw him and waved a claw merrily.

So the fisherman paddled the boat out into
the lake, and because it was in so much better repair than it had been, he
could take it out much further, until the land was only a dark smudge on the
horizon. And there, when he threw in the net, it filled with such an enormous
catch that he would never have been able to pull it all aboard if the crab had
not been there to help.

“See what taking me for an apprentice for
you,” the crab said.

“You can have whatever you want from the
net,” the fisherman said, “in accordance with what we agreed.”

That was the turn of the fisherman’s
fortunes. Each day, he and the crab would go out into the lake, and throw in
the net just once; and, each day, they would return with such a catch that the
boat seemed about to be swamped by the lake waters. If ever the net tore or the
boat sprung a leak, the crab would mend it instantly, so that their work did
not suffer even for a single day. Little by little, the fisherman the fisherman
grew rich enough that he managed to build a larger and better hut, and even put
a little money by. But though each day he offered the crab whatever it wanted
from the net, as always, the animal declined.

For a year and a day it went on like this;
and then, one morning, the fisherman threw in the net as usual, far from the
shore; and when he brought it up, among all the other fish there was one which
glittered black and gold, and had eyes that looked human.

“I must take that fish to the king,” the
fisherman thought. “He will pay me a goodly sum for it, and keep it in his
royal pond, for surely this is a fish the likes of which have never been seen
before.”

But the crab spoke up. “Fisherman,” it
said. “Do you remember the promise you made me, to give me whatever I wanted
from what came up in your nets?”

“Yes, of course,” the fisherman replied.

“Good,” the crab said. “In that case, I
want that fish, the one that glitters black and gold and has human eyes.”

Though the fisherman sighed with regret, he
had to admit his apprentice was within its rights. So, reaching in to the net,
he brought out the fish with the human eyes which glittered black and gold, and
handed it to the crustacean. At once, the crab took the fish in its claws and,
holding it out over the side of the boat, dropped it into the water.

“What are you doing?” the fisherman gasped.
“It’s getting away!”

“It will be of great service to you
someday,” the crab told him, “just as I was. And, in any case, it was my fish,
to do with as I like.”

The fisherman had to admit the truth of
this, and, albeit with many a sigh of regret, he turned the boat towards shore.

Now it so happened that the ruler of the
kingdom had a treasury filled with gold and silver, which he hoarded jealously
to himself, even when his subjects went hungry; for he was a vain and miserly
king. But of all his riches, the greatest was a small box filled with jewels
from all corners of the world, whose fame was known throughout the land. And
word of it finally reached the ears of a particular thief, who prided himself
on being able to steal even the smile from a baby’s lips as it gazed upon its
mother. At once he decided he would steal that box of jewels, and vowed to do
so no matter how securely it might be guarded.

That very night, having managed to enter
the palace by an upper window, the thief found his way past locked doors and
alert sentries to the treasury, from which he took the famous box and tied it
in the folds of his turban. But as he was leaving the palace, though he easily
passed by the guards and the locked portals, by ill chance a chambermaid, who
was coming from an illicit liaison with a groom, saw him and raised the alarm.
The thief, finding himself chased by all the guards in the palace, fled as fast
as he could go. And though he ran like the wind, he was alone, and they were
many; so that they raised the alarm and more of the king’s men began converging
from several directions.

Finally the thief saw that there was no
escape; he would be caught for sure, for on three sides of him were groups of
onrushing sentries, while on the fourth was only the huge expanse of the lake,
far too broad to swim. But there was a small hut near the lake shore, and there
was just time for him to take the box out of his turban, thrust it into the
palm fronds with which the roof was thatched, and walk quickly away. Though the
guards caught him, they searched him and found nothing, so they let him go.

The fisherman was, of course, not so
fortunate. Roused by the blows of the sentries’ spear shafts on the door, he
hurried out and was instantly seized, while the troops ransacked his home. In
moments they had found the box and, binding him with ropes, they dragged the
fisherman to the king. But the monarch was still asleep, so they threw him,
still bound, into a cell beneath the palace, to await his fate in the morning.

At dawn, the crab crawled out of his crack
in the rock at the bottom of the pool as usual, to greet his friend the
fisherman. But the hut was empty, the door broken down, the things inside
strewn about, and even the roof ripped apart. Peering inside, the crab found no
trace of the man. But, having friends among the rats and moles of the lakeside,
he asked them if they knew anything. And one or two of them said that they’d
seen the fisherman being dragged away with ropes in the direction of the
palace.

So, keeping to the shadows and the shelter
of trees and hedges, the crab scuttled in the direction of the palace, and,
shortly after sunrise, he reached it. Hiding among bushes near the front door,
he listened to the sentries talking and soon understood what had happened; and,
by following them as they went on their rounds, he discovered where the cells
were. Squeezing his flat, armoured body through a tiny ventilator slit, he
dropped into the cell which held his friend, still bound and half dead with
fright.

“Take courage,” he said to the fisherman.
“I am your apprentice, and pledged to take care of you. And no harm will come
to you as long as I live.”

“That is easy for you to say,” the poor
fisherman groaned. “But I lie here bound
hand and foot, and in an hour the king will doubtless have me hanged or
impaled, all for no fault of my own.”

“I have been listening to the conversation
of the guards,” the crab said. “And that has suggested to me a course of action
that will not fail. This is what you must do...”

The fisherman listened, but shook his head.
“I could never get my hands free in time,” he said.

“I will cut your ropes through partly with
my claws,” the crab said, “so that when you need to, you can break them easily.
But until then, make no move to show that you are no longer tightly bound.”

“And then what happens, when my bonds are
free?” the fisherman asked. “The soldiers will still be there with their
spears, ready to stick them in me.”

“Don’t worry about that,” the crab said,
busily working on the rope. “When the time comes, you’ll see. I think I can
hear them coming for you now.” Squeezing through a crack between the wall and
the floor, he found his way to the sewers, and from there, he made his way back
towards the lake.

Meanwhile the fisherman, still in his
ropes, was brought before the king, who sat on his high throne, looking down
angrily at the court.

“This is the man who stole the box of
jewels,” the guards said. “We found it hidden in his roof.”

“He must answer with his life for this
crime,” the monarch said, frowning terribly. “Take him away and hang him at
once!”

At these words the fisherman felt weak at
the knees and about to faint, but he took a deep breath and pulled himself
together, remembering the crab’s words. “I am innocent,” he said. “But if I
must die, as an innocent man, let me at least choose the way I leave this
world.”

The king considered a moment. “I see no
harm in that,” he said. “How do you wish to be killed?”

“I have always lived by the waters of the
lake,” the fisherman responded, “and I have earned my living from it. The only
proper way for me to perish is in its embrace.”

“Very well,” the king said. “We shall take
you out in a boat and throw you into the water; but beware lest you come up
again, even for a breath, for my men will be ready to cut you into pieces.”

“He won’t come up even once,” the commander
of the guard laughed. “Not with the knots my men tied him, he won’t.”

So they took the fisherman to the bank,
near enough so he could see his own hut, perhaps for the last time; and they
then put him on his own boat, and rowed him far out into the lake, until they
were in its centre, where the water was deepest.

“Remember,” the commander of the guard
said, “if you come up, even for a breath of air, our spears are ready and
waiting.” And, without a further word, they threw him into the water.

As the water of the lake closed over his
head, the fisherman, fighting down panic and remembering what the crab had told
him, worked his hands and feet so that the weakened ropes broke and fell away.
But even so he was under the surface, and he did not dare rise again because of
the spears waiting for him. It seemed to him, as his lungs felt about to burst
for want of air, that he’d merely exchanged death by hanging for death by
drowning, and it would be the end of him, after all.

But all of a sudden he felt something
swimming beside him, and a hundred slippery bodies crowding around him and
pushing him along; and when he opened his eyes, he caught a glimpse of a
hundred shining bodies of black and glittering gold. They pushed him along so
swiftly that when he finally could no longer last without breathing, he came to
the surface far enough away from the boat that the guards didn’t see him at
all. Then the fishes pulled him under again and swam with him out to the far
side of the lake.

There, at last, they brought him to a
cavern at the base of a cliff, the only entrance to which was under the water;
and there he found, waiting for him, his old friend the crab.

“I told you that the fish would be of help
to you,” the crustacean said, waving a claw in greeting. “And here you can stay
in this cavern with me, and nobody will bother us ever again. There’s no
shortage of things to eat, and I’ll bring you whatever you want.”

“You’re supposed to be my apprentice,” the
fisherman replied, when he’d somewhat recovered. “I’m supposed to teach you how
to fish. But here in this cavern, how can I?”

“We can bring you the boat and net, if you
like, when the soldiers have gone,” the crab said. “Would you like that?”

The fisherman looked at the black and gold
fish flickering back and forth under the water, and once in a while raising
their heads to look at him.

“No,” he said at last. “I don’t think I’ll
be catching fish again.”A little later he asked the crab: "And you? Why are you doing all this? I can't teach you any more than I have already, so why are you doing all this for me?"The crab was silent for a moment. "You gave me the chance to be more than just a crab," he said.

Monday, 15 February 2016

As you all know by now (if you’ve been
paying any attention at all, that is), I watch rather a lot of the extraordinarily
slick videos ISIS is so kind as to put out on the web for everyone. Most of
them, frankly, aren’t all that special; there’s only that many beheadings you
can show, after all, before it gets old. So ISIS has shown a shift from
beheading videos in recent days to other methods of offing people it doesn’t
like.

One of the recent videos which made the
news depicted – allegedly – a four year old ISIS kid blowing up three “spies”
in a car. It was one of the many cartoonishly evil things ISIS does that seems calculated
to make people think it’s mindlessly evil, and there’s definitely a method to
that madness, as I’ll discuss in a moment.

Before I go further, let me say that there’s
absolutely nothing unique about child “soldiers” in Syria murdering prisoners.
The blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama’s pet “moderate” cannibals
were doing that back in 2012, as you can see right here:

Nobody except us Putin trolls and Assad
apologists, all card-carrying enemies of freedom and democracy, had got hot
under the collar then, though.

This ISIS video allegedly depicts the kid with the “new Jihadi John”, claimed to be one Siddhartha Dhar, which, going by
his name, means he’s not just of Indian origin, not Arab, but from the same ethnic group
as me. Ah well.

This Dhar allegedly converted to Islam, or more precisely to the ISIS
creed of ISISlam, and went to Syria from Britain with his wife and kids. And it’s allegedly a British kid called Dare who stars in this video, along with the three doomed “spies”.

For several days I held off on watching
this video. I thought I’d had enough of violence and mayhem. And then I decided
that it couldn’t hurt to have a look and at least satisfy my curiosity. So I
looked, and...

Let’s go over the salient points of the
video once. According to the usual ISIS credits at the beginning, courtesy
their al Hayat media office, it was shot in or around Raqqa.

Three (oddly calm) bearded men in the
trademark bright orange jumpsuits are apparently in a dark room ; only their
faces, shoulders, and clip-on-microphones are visible. They “identify”
themselves (subtitles are helpfully available) and “confess” to spying and
membership of sleeper cells. They say how much money they were given, and what
kind of cameras, and where they went and what they did. Whenever they speak
somebody’s name, though, the names of their “handlers” or “contacts”, the name
is bleeped out and (this is another proof of the extreme sophistication of ISIS
videos) the mouth of the speaker is
blurred out so nobody can do a spot of lip-reading.

After all these confessions
are over, the kid and what might be Dhar – the former in camouflage fatigues
– appear in front of a white car parked in the desert with the three men
visible inside.

The following images are all from here - and you can see more photos there from the video:

Dhar delivers a rant aimed at Cameron, kid points off into the
desert and talks about killing kaffirs there. The camera shifts back to the
three “spies” in the car, who tell of how those who are against the Islamic
State must repent while they still can. Kid’s shown pressing a remote control,
or a box resembling a remote control, and the camera shows the car from a
distance. The car then blows up in a fountain of sand and flame and shattered
metal.

Let’s see some of the things in this video
which stink to high heaven. First of all is the bleeping out of the names of
the “handlers”/”contacts” and the blurring out of the mouths when talking about
them. Why on earth should this be done, if the “confessions” are genuine?
Assuming the “spies” identified themselves by their real names, their presumed
handlers would know who they are, isn’t that so? Wouldn’t they then take the
usual precautions? So, if the confessions are genuine, what’s the point of
blurring out the names – unless said names are of people who don’t exist?
People whose existence, or otherwise, can be checked up on?

The second is the fact that the “blowing up”
occurred in a car. One can suppose ISIS has cars to blow up for fun – after all,
it captured enough Humvees to turn them en masse into suicide bombs – but what’s
the “value”, if any, of using one of them to blow away prisoners? What’s the
deterrent effect of an execution where all you can see is a tiny speck of car
in the far distance before it explodes?

In other videos where prisoners were blown
up, which I’ve watched, said blowing up was always shown in gruesome detail, including
fragments of flesh and body parts raining down from the air afterwards, to
bounce on the ground in front of the camera. In this instance, for some strange
reason, there was nothing like that. At least the reason is strange, unless you
take it that it was all set up. There was no such execution, and the “spies”
are no such thing; perhaps, in fact, ISIS men dressed up for the part.

Why should it do any such thing, though?

Remember I said something about ISIS being cartoonishly
evil? In fact, ISIS goes out of its way to act like a Hollywood Evil Incarnate,
even though, in actual terms, the suffering it inflicts is probably less than
what less flamboyantly murderous groups like al Nusra or al Shabaab do. But
those two groups are at least, whatever else they are, wholly genuine. ISIS, at
least in its top levels, is an objective ally of its alleged enemies in the
west.

Let’s see what we have: ISIS tries to show
the world how evil it is, in a new and eye catching fashion. It creates a new “Jihadi
John”, who of course, in order to attract attention, has to be even more evil
than his predecessor. In order to do that, he’s got to do something more evil,
more depraved, than beheading. Having a kid do the killing is something that
would at once achieve the goal of being eviller than thou.

Of course, you can’t really expect a four
year old kid to hack off heads. He doesn’t have the muscular strength. But he
can be given a box and be expected to press a button, after making a few
rehearsed remarks, That’s all it takes.

But why should ISIS want to appear so
cartoonishly evil? Well, that’s got everything to do with it and its Western de facto allies’ mutual antipathy to the
legitimate Syrian government of Bashar Assad. According to the standard
propaganda spread by the minions of the blood soaked war criminal Barack
Hussein Obama, Assad “created ISIS” (in fact, no, it was the blood soaked war
criminal Barack Hussein Obama himself who did), and is not fighting ISIS (in
fact, no, it’s the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama himself who isn’t). According to them, Assad must be overthrown first in order for the
(nonexistent) “moderate opposition” to join forces to beat ISIS. Since these “moderates”
don’t exist, and since Assad, with Russian, Iranian, and Hizbollah help, is
exterminating the terrorist gangs of all sorts, it’s obviously in ISIS’
interests to try and shift the focus to unseating Assad, something the blood
soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama is frantic to do anyway.

Quite apart from all that is the secondary benefit of spreading suspicion and hatred against Syrian kids among the refugees in Europe; and the racism in that continent is already bubbling over. Hatred of children may well be all it takes to make it even more official than it already is.

At least that’s my reading. If you have a
better one, go ahead and let me know.

Back in
the early 1990s, when I was a student in Lucknow, I had a friend from Kenya called
Thomas Nicholas Otieno Ogutu.

There was nothing very special about Tom
Ogutu except for his height; he was about two metres tall. But, of course, he
was black – and that was the problem.

Lucknow is in North India, and if there’s
one place I’ve ever seen that’s crawling with racism, North India is it. At
that time, twenty-odd years ago, there were a lot of African students in
Lucknow: mostly Kenyans and Nigerians, but with a smattering of Malawians,
Sudanese, and the odd Somali and Ghanaian. But whatever they were, they faced
the same brutal racism from the Lucknowites.

I’ve seen black people called “monkeys” to
their faces. I’ve seen them terrified even to be seen in the company of Indian
women (my cousins, who visited me in Lucknow in 1992) because, as one said,
they “would be skinned alive”. My roommate and his best friend, who were both
ethnic East Asians from the state of Arunachal Pradesh and hence was considered
to be “Chinese” or “Nepali” by the Lucknowites and subject to racial
discrimination as well, thought it hilarious to call Tom Ogutu “Homogutu” and asked me to “autoclave myself” after
visiting him because, being an African, he was naturally crawling with germs,
specifically HIV. (The sister of the best friend is now married to a Tanzanian;
wonder if he remembers the “Homogutu” slur and what he thinks about it now.) I’ve
myself had to explain to many Africans that not all Indians are alike and that
I had no racial animosity towards them, and I don’t know how many of them believed
me.

That was in North India and back in the
pre-internet, pre-cable TV age, and since then India’s gone through a cultural
convulsion; we’ve even had a sexual revolution which the Hindunazis have tried,
and failed, to contain. One would have thought that with increasing interaction
with the world, the tide of racism would’ve ebbed.

A few days ago, in Bangalore – a cosmopolitan,
modern city in South India, which has many foreigners from all over the world
living and working there – a car driven by a Sudanese man knocked down and
killed a woman. The Sudanese was duly arrested, and that should’ve been the end
of the story. However, this is India. Intent on revenge, a mob gathered, and, half an
hour after the incident, stopped a car in which a young Tanzanian woman was travelling,
along with a couple of other men. They beat the men, burned the car, stripped
the Tanzanian woman naked and “paraded” her as punishment. The police who were
at the scene watched, making no attempt to interfere. When a decent, honest
bystander tried to protect her, he was thrashed by the crowd as well.

It was only several days later that the
incident made the news, and then the police and the state government tried
their best to pretend it was a “case of road rage,” not racism, and that the
woman was not stripped. In fact it was the government at the Centre which was
more proactive in the matter, and the Tanzanian diplomatic authorities also
stepped in. Black African students in India were quoted in the media as saying
that this was something they knew perfectly well could happen to any of them,
any day, and for a brief instant of time the spotlight was on Indian racism.
But of course that won’t change a thing, just as the “new tough” anti-rape laws
didn’t decrease rapes in the slightest.

******************************************

That was the
first of three little vignettes on Hindunazistan I’m going to bring you today,
as a window on what’s been happening here during the last few weeks I’ve not
been writing. I’m still not fully recovered and there’s a way to go before I
can write like I used to, but I need to start because each day I stay away
makes it harder to get the mental discipline back which is necessary to write.

******************************************

Siachen
is a glacier in the mountains of northern Kashmir, sandwiched between China in
the north, Indian Kashmir to the south, and Pakistani Kashmir to the west. When
India and Pakistan fought their first “war” over Kashmir back in 1948, which
left Pakistan occupying about a third of Kashmiri territory (hilariously, India
still pretends it “won” the war), the status of Siachen was left undetermined
in the UN-mediated ceasefire that ended the conflict. Since the early 1980s,
though, India and Pakistan have faced off over the glacier, in a slow-motion
high-altitude conflict which has seen small scale attacks, counterattacks, and
some bloodshed. Mostly, though, the casualties have come from the brutal
climate, where both sides maintain posts on mountain ridges throughout the
year, because to withdraw in winter would mean the other side might be in
possession of those heights when one’s own troops are sent back as summer comes
round again.

On 3rd February, an avalanche in
Siachen struck an Indian Army outpost, burying ten soldiers. A rescue party
attempting to dig out the corpses found one of them, Lance Corporal (Lance Naik
in the Indian Army rank nomenclature) Hanumanthappa Koppad, alive six days
afterwards. Despite being immediately airlifted to hospital, he died on the 11th
February of massive organ failure.

Grateful to have a distraction from the
racism issue, the media went wild over Hanumanthappa, declaring him to be the “Siachen
braveheart”, and celebrating his life and death. While I have no problem over
the overfed, overentertained, overpaid Great Indian Muddle Class deigning to
take a sympathetic look for once at one of the working class people who fill
the ranks of the armed forces, I noticed one signal omission; the media seemed
incapable of asking a simple question – what the hell are we doing in Siachen,
anyway? What’s so damned important that we have to hold on to it at colossal
expenditure of lives as well as money and equipment?

If you ask the Indian Army top brass this,
the boilerplate answer is always that it’s a “strategic” location which can’t
be given up under any circumstances. To which my answer is: horse dung.

In the interval between 1948 and 1984,
India and Pakistan fought three full scale wars. Two of them were fought over
Kashmir, in 1947-48 and 1965, while the one in 1971 did involve combat
operations in the state as well. During these decades, India had not occupied
Siachen and as far as is known Pakistan hadn’t done so either. Did it affect
the strategic position adversely in any way?

No.

In 1999, India and Pakistan fought another “war”
over Kargil, to the south of Siachen – a conflict which included Indian
airstrikes, artillery duels across the frontier, and mass WWI-style frontal
assaults up mountain slopes. At that same time, India and Pakistan were faced
off over Siachen. Did India’s occupation of Siachen stop Pakistan’s alleged “aggression”
in Kargil? Of course not.

According to the Hindunazis who now rule
India, the nuclear “deterrent” India possesses makes any aggression by Pakistan
suicidal, because India can wipe them out. In that case, what’s the point of
hanging on to Siachen? Or are the Hindunazis admitting that their cherished
nuclear deterrent isn’t really a deterrent at all? It certainly didn’t deter
Kargil!

Then there’s the question of how long this
Siachen thing is going to be maintained. Obviously, Pakistan isn’t going to
just evaporate like the morning dew. It’s not going anywhere. Nor is India ever
going to reoccupy the third of Kashmir it lost in the 1948 war, whatever the
rhetoric. So how long does India hold on to Siachen, and condemn its soldiers
to death and incapacitation from the weather? Ten more years? Forty? Till the
end of time? Is it just the prestige issue of “fighting on the highest
battlefield in the world” which is keeping this ridiculous warlet going?

Someone should demand the answers.

******************************************

The “sacrifice”
made by Hanumanthappa hadn’t yet died away in the media before being revived as
a cause celebre and a weapon against students in the Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU) in Delhi. JNU has historically been a bastion of left liberal
thought in the desert of brain-dead Hindunazism that covers North India in a
blanket. JNU’s current student union president, Kanhaiya Kumar, is from a
student’s association affiliated with the Communist Party of India.

Before I go on further, I must say
something: I’m less than enthusiastic about student’s unions and student’s
politics, though I recognise (from personal experience) that there have to be
safeguards to protect students from official high-handedness. Back in Lucknow I
watched faculty members browbeat and hound students they didn’t like literally
to suicide; I was myself warned not to contradict teachers in class (when they
said things not to be found in any textbook) or else I’d never be permitted to pass the examinations. So,
yes, students do need some kind of union to look out for their interests. But
that union should be kept totally away from party politics; and in India, party
politics is next door to criminal gangdom. JNU’s union is a bone of contention
between parties, and the Hindunazis’ constant failure to co-opt the union has
merely made them desperate to bring it down in any way they can.

I have written elsewhere about Afzal Guru,
hanged as a “terrorist” by the Indian state though even the Supreme Court of
India admitted the evidence against him was unclear and lacking. Clearly, Guru
was hanged because he was a convenient scapegoat, someone who was being thrown
before the public as a way to vent their anger. Though it was the last Congress
government which hanged him, not coincidentally shortly before the elections,
it was the Hindunazis who had been raving, ranting and rabidly salivating in
their demands to have him executed. Recently, the JNU students union held a
commemorative function for Guru in which, it is alleged, some slogans were
raised saying the Indian state would pay for the crime of hanging him, or words
to that effect.

What happened? The police entered the
campus, arrested Kanhaiya Kumar on the charge of sedition, and dragged him off
to prison. The Hindunazi troll brigade, and Modi’s slaves in the Great Indian
Muddle Class media, attacked the JNU, calling the students “traitors”. The
Hindunazi BJP Home Minister, one Rajnath Singh, claimed that the Pakistani jihadi
outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba’s chief Hafiz Saeed was “behind” the event. Called out
on it by all the non-Hindunazi parties – including the Congress, which had
committed the crime of hanging Guru – and asked to prove his claim, Rajnath
Singh, last I heard, hasn’t attempted to do so.

As of this writing, the faculty of the JNU,
as well as other universities across India, and all non-Hindunazi major
political parties, are united in supporting Kanhaiya Kumar and the JNU student’s
union. The students themselves have gone on strike. Modi’s troll brigade, and
his acolytes in the media, have been reduced to dragging up Hanumanthappa as
some kind of weapon against the students, as though there was any relation
between the two. But then Hindunazis are Nazis, and there’s no expecting sense
from them anyway.

I’ll just say this to the Modi brigade: If
you have to impose “patriotism” by diktat, it’s likely that your country doesn’t
have one hell of a lot to be “patriotic” about anyway.

Indian troops at Siachen. Note the obsolete INSAS rifle, rejected even by the Nepali army, which the Indian army still uses. [Source]

Update: While the anti-Hindunazi protests are continuing and spreading, it turns out that the tweet Rajnath Singh cited as "proof" that Hafiz Saeed was behind the original protest was fake.